Monday, August 13, 2012

Checking in on the Giants' lineup

Earlier a wrote a few posts on what the SF Giants' optimal starting lineup should be using Basim, a baseball simulator I wrote. A lot has changed since then, though--Posey has become much better, Blanco and Pagan have cooled off, and Hunter Pence and Marco Scutaro have joined the club. So, what should the Giants' lineup look like now? What lineup do I hope they start tonight?

First off, here was my guess at their best lineup (once again assumin Zito is the pitcher):

Running this lineup through the simulator*, it scored an average of 4.03 runs per game.

I then found that a random lineup (i.e. random ordering of the nine players) scored about 3.89 runs per game. The lineups that the simulator liked the best generally had Posey, Belt, Cabrera, or Pence batting leadoff, which is unsurprising--each has either a high OBP or a high ground into double play rate that would be very painful in the heart of the order. The single lineup that the simulator liked best** was the following:

I then looked at two lineups that were close to what I predict the Giants will run; they differ only in whether the Giants play Theriot or Crawford; the lineup Pagan, Scutaro, Cabrera, Posey Sandoval, Pence, Belt Theriot, Zito scored an average of 3.96 runs per game, while the same lineup but with Crawford batting for Theriot scored 4.00 runs per game on average. So, it seems like about half the difference between my lineup and the one with Theriot just comes fromt the fact that Craword is better than Theriot.

Anyway, here's to hoping the Giants will do something smart.

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*: For Pence and Scutaro I used their pre-Giants numbers.

**: This should be taken with a grain of salt--to actually find the best would take days of simulation; treat this as a lineup that is pretty close to the best.